Walmart Amps Up Cloud Capabilities, Reducing Reliance on Tech Giants

wsj.com

10 pointsbrakmic3 comments

"Walmart Inc. said on Thursday it has developed the capability to switch seamlessly between cloud providers and its own servers, saving millions of dollars and offering a road map to other organizations that want to reduce their dependence on giant technology companies..."

There are two big threats to Amazon's AWS money machine. The first, is that a lot of their customers were VC-funded money burners that will simply go away or get much, much smaller (e.g. Uber). The second, is that competition from Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM, etc. will turn cloud computing into a commodity with thin profit margins.

Worse, I think both threats will hit them at the same time in the next couple years.

AWS was built in the first place to commodify cloud computing and had very thin profit margins in its early years (commodify your complements, as they say), so if that is a threat they are now unprepared for, they've made some interesting mistakes along the way.

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